Sadie Sink wants to be free of no matter nostalgia curse has condemned her to a profession filled with pop synth soundtracks.
If Sink appeared the plain alternative to lead O’Dessa – a dystopian rock opera that seems like an 80s retro futurist screensaver lurching to life – it’s due to her impression in Fear Street: Part 2 and Stranger Things. Both situate the seemingly wise-beyond-her years star within the reimagined previous of 40 to 50 years in the past.
Fear Street, the RL Stine adaptation, had Sink sinking her tooth into a giddy homage to Friday the thirteenth. That got here after Stranger Things – that in style mashup of John Carpenter, Steven Spielberg and John Hughes – put her on the map. Who might neglect Sink’s most iconic (and viral) second in Stranger Things, reviving Kate Bush’s 1985 hit Running Up That Hill with a needle drop that releases Sink’s character Max from demonic possession, whereas sentencing the actor to much more time spent within the period of neon fever goals?
The lilac hues and barren future landscapes from Bush’s music video for Running Up That Hill are among the many recycled seems to be in O’Dessa, a temper board of a film that cites Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain amongst its references, however in its remaining incarnation harkens again to cult faves resembling Phantom of the Paradise and The Running Man. Writer and director Geremy Jasper, a former indie musician who scored a crowd pleaser together with his hip-hop coming-of-age musical Patti Cake$, conjures up a world the place a dreary metropolis drenched in plasma colors is surrounded by scorched earth. The photographs will be intoxicating, however his narrative, following Sink’s Mad Max-like drifter, meanders alongside, as if awestruck by its personal lo-fi visible design.
Sink’s O’Dessa hails from the farmlands, her auburn hair complementing the rusty panorama. She comes from a lengthy line of “ramblers”, nomadic musicians who consider their songs can change the world, which at current is dominated by a tyrannical gameshow host (The White Lotus’s Murray Bartlett).
O’Dessa is particular. She’s the so-called “seventh son” in accordance to prophecy, inheriting a guitar from her late father with the etchings of a tree, its roots flowing with liquid that turns luminous at her contact. In one of many movie’s early people rock musical numbers that cease the narrative lifeless in its tracks, and tackle the qualities of self-contained music movies, O’Dessa hollers out, “On these six strings, I’ll sing my destiny.”
After her mom dies due to some undefined sickness, O’Dessa lights out on the road, has her cherished guitar stolen by a carnivalesque travelling troupe and finds herself in Satylite City, a neon-lit industrial wasteland the place the lots are saved in thrall to Bartlett’s grandstanding dictator with a man bun, Plutonovich. He hosts “The One”, an America’s Got Talent-like competitors, which is the place O’Dessa will inevitably be reunited together with her guitar and stage a televised revolution.
It takes a whereas to get to that telegraphed finale, as O’Dessa first fumbles round in a romance with Kelvin Harrison Jr’s Euri Dervish. He’s a tragic lounge performer, usually draped in fineries, occupying the sort of seductive function that may sometimes go to a girl. The movie’s informal gender ambiguity, the place Sink’s character, costumed to appear to be David Bowie, is referred to because the “seventh son”, is noteworthy even when it doesn’t quantity to extra than simply vibes.
And these vibes aren’t sufficient to carry this dragged-out love affair, with O’Dessa and Euri occupying far an excessive amount of time in mattress, both caressing one another or crooning collectively, trying to find chemistry that simply isn’t there. Harrison (not too long ago heard in Mufasa) and Sink are each fantastic actors who simply aren’t in tune, what with him purring like a sexpot, and her rewiring the lovable teen romance vitality from Stranger Things.
Regina Hall is one other supremely proficient star utterly at a loss on this surroundings. She performs the black-leather-clad Neon Dion, a ruthless native crime boss who preys on and traffics Euri. Hall, sporting electrical brass knuckles and delivering villainous platitudes with a stilted archness, can’t even lean on her screwball comedic instincts for some enjoyable, by no means thoughts the degrees of camp throughout her.
Everyone’s stumbling alongside in a vaguely outlined universe, which actually solely serves as a backdrop to catchy musical numbers that evolve from people to pop rock. You would possibly charitably forgive the clumsiness within the plotting have been O’Dessa packaged merely as a visible album fairly than a feature-length film that lengthy overstays its welcome. But for that to work, the music wants to be memorable. Instead, O’Dessa, in its aggressive pursuit to feel and appear like a factor of the previous, is doomed to be simply forgotten.
